How Children's Literature and Fairytales affect our lives today

I used to get so frustrated

when characters went into awesome magical lands and then came back. Why wouldn’t they stay there?! Chihiro, you had a friend that was a dragon. In “the real world” we don’t have friends like that! (unless their Chinese Zodiac is a dragon or they are a metaphorical dragon, but I digress…) And then I was thinking –twelve plus hours of driving will do that to you– the reason Alice, the Pevencys, Chihiro, and others come back from magical, topsy-turvy, sometimes dangerous worlds is because they learned something. And their job from that moment onward was to take the skills they learned into “the real world”. If they had stayed, the lesson may not have yet been learned. One must come back from their adventure once they’ve gleaned all they could from it, otherwise, what is the point in still being there? I’d imagine it’s akin to overstaying your welcome. You’ve learned all you could here, now you must take what you’ve learned and apply it to your own life.

As I mentioned in my Stuart Little post, I’m in Oregon deciding if this is where I want to live. People have told me I adjust quickly and learn fast. Who knows what I will learn from being on this trip? Whether it’s the answer to, “Do I wanna move here?” or more information about myself, it’s only day three, I’ve got twenty-seven more to go.